Rob Ousbey – The Evolution of SEO: Split-Testing for Search

About Rob:

Rob Ousbey is a VP for Distilled, the online marketing company. Rob joined the small, London-based Distilled team in 2008 as an junior team member, delivering SEO for local clients, and later took on reputation management for a variety of politicians, CEOs, and celebrities.

In 2010, Distilled had an opportunity to expand beyond the UK, so Rob moved to Seattle to establish Distilled in the US. He spent the following years building a team of exceptional online marketing experts who deliver strategic and tactical work for everyone from fast-growth startups to the world’s largest brands.

Rob now splits his time between running the Seattle office, sitting on the Distilled leadership team, hosting the Searchlove conferences, and traveling for clients and speaking engagements around the US and APAC.

In his previous life, Rob worked in broadcasting; he was a radio producer and later presented his own national shows – but is most proud of pushing his station to be the first in the UK to podcast their programming. When no one is looking, Rob lets his hacker/coder side come out, and has released a number of popular games, services and SEO tools.

Outside of the internet, Rob loves exploring the Pacific Northwest with his son; they recently returned from five days ‘off-the-grid’ in the Washington state wilderness.

In this Session:

SEO has always sat at the intersection between being a science and an art. We all love to try out new ideas and try to understand what makes the search engines tick, but it can be frustrating to have to cut through the guesswork and speculation just to figure out what Google really wants from us. Even worse, we still find ourselves making SEO changes, seeing uplifts, but then not knowing which changes actually had any impact.

Fortunately, new software and better technologies now make it possible to run proper SEO-focused tests and, for the first time, actually measure the impact that each SEO change has on our site. Rob will share these techniques, discuss some of the experiments that Distilled has been running, reveal the unexpected things they’ve learned along the way, and share how you can start running experiments yourself.